by Dale Bailey
“Do you think the poet that read the other night—the one with the beautiful hair—was any better than you are?”
“He has the National Book Award to prove it.”
“Is that the measure of success?”
“So it would seem. Here in Cerulean Cliffs anyway.”
“What do you believe, Ben?”
“What’s an artist without an audience?”
“I have an audience. They mostly despise me, but they can’t look away. I have a raft of awards. Does that make me an artist?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you are.”
“And yet you’re drawn to me.”
“Am I?”
“You show up at my home without invitation.”
“It was you who spoke to me first.”
Ben turned and rested his elbows on the railing. He finished his drink and studied the horizon. Ruin had crept still closer, ashen and gray, enveloping the sea. For some reason, tears sprang to his eyes. For the first time in months, he found himself wanting to write, to set down lines in tribute to the lost world—yet even this aspiration exceeded his meager talent, and he grieved that, too: that the poems in his mind slipped through his fingers like rain. He grieved the hollowness at the heart of the enterprise. Nothing lasted. Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. Except that the rhyme too came to ruin in the end.
Veronica handed him another drink.
“It won’t be much longer now, will it?” she said.
“No.”
“What spectacular suicide have you devised?”
“None. I suppose I’ll see it through.”
“Perhaps suicide too is an art.”
“That’s the premise of your work, isn’t it?”
“L’art pour l’art.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know. I suppose there is truth in what I do. The truth of ruin and death.”
“You sound like Vinnizi.”
“Is that what he told you? Poor Vinnizi. He was a fool. He made films about gunfights and car chases, that’s all. The most artistic thing he ever did was hurl himself over that cliff.” She paused. “Have you seen my work?”
“Photographs.”
“Then you have not seen it.”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
Yet he did. In some secret chamber of his heart he yearned for nothing more, and when she turned away from him and started into the house, Ben followed, all too aware of the lines of her body beneath her dress. She turned to smile at him.
The door swung shut at his back. The air smelled of lavender. A whisper of air-conditioning caressed his skin. The floor plan was open, airy, the sparse furniture upholstered in white leather, and he was struck suddenly by the similarity to Stan’s house—the similarity to all the ruined houses he had fled in the light of dawn. Only here and there stood white pedestals, and on the pedestals—Ben felt his stomach clench—Veronica Glass’s art. A woman’s arm, severed at the shoulder and bent at the elbow, segmented into thin discs laid in order, an inch between, as though the wounds had never been inflicted, the hand alone still whole, palm up, like Vinizzi’s, in supplication. The flesh had been preserved somehow, encased in a thin clear coat of silicone; he could see the white bone, the pinkish muscle, the neatly sundered nexus of artery and vein. A detail from the New Yorker profile came to him: how she strapped her subjects down and worked her way up to the final amputation, sans anesthesia, applying the first thin layer of silicone at every cut to keep the volunteer from bleeding out. A collaboration, she called her work, and the horror of it came to him afresh: in the leg flayed and tacked open from hip to toe to reveal the long muscles within; the severed penis, quartered from head to scrotum, and pinned back like a terrible flower; and, dear God, the ultimate volunteer, the shaven head mounted on a waist-high pedestal, a once-handsome man, lips sewn shut with heavy black cord, small spikes driven into his eyes.
The room seemed suddenly appalling.
Ben flung himself away and staggered outside to the verandah. Downing his drink, he stared out at the sea and the encroaching ruin, and saw for himself the absurdity of Vinnizi’s claim that all along he’d been making films about the end of everything. This was ruin and horror, this the art of final things. Then she touched his shoulder and Ben turned and she pressed her lips to his and dear God, his cock was like a spike he was so hard—
Ben thrust her away and stumbled down the spiral stair to the lawn. When he turned at the cliff side to look back, she was still there, standing against the railing, watching him. Her sheer dress blew back in some vagary of the wind, exposing her body so that he could see the weight of her breasts and the dark triangle of her sex. Another jolt of desire convulsed him and once again he turned away. He clambered down the stair to the beach, tore off his clothes and waded into the ocean, but no matter how long he scrubbed himself in the clear water that had not yet succumbed to ruin, he could not wash himself clean.
He told Stan of it; he told Lois.
His cigarette trembled as he described it. He drank off two glasses of scotch as he spoke and poured another. The bottle chattered against the rim of the glass. He had known the nature of her work, had seen the photos, had read the profile. Yet nothing had prepared him for the way its cold reality shook him. What had Dickinson written? I like a look of agony because I know it’s true. And had any poet in his ken written a poem so true as Veronica Glass’s work—so icy that it shivered him, so fiery that it burned? Was this not art, and did not his own work—the work of any poet or novelist, sculptor or composer—pale in comparison?
Ruin closed inexorably upon them. The parties became ever more frenetic. Suicides came in clusters now. One night, flying on heroin and prime, Gabrielle Abbruzzese slit her own throat at the stroke of midnight. The vast house rang with her otherworldly sonic landscapes, and she twirled as she died, her white ball gown blooming around her. Blood sprayed the revelers. Finally she collapsed, one leg folding under her like a broken doll’s. Someone else seized the blade from her still warm hand, and then another, and another until the floor was littered with corpses. Ben and Lois watched from the gallery above. Looking up from the slaughter, Ben locked gazes with Veronica Glass, on the other side of the great circular balcony. She gave him an enigmatic smile and vanished into the crowd. The revel continued until dawn. Dancers twirled among the bloody corpses until ruin withered the privet and shattered the lawn; they made their escape as the land burned black behind them.
So passed the nights. The days passed in a haze of sun and sleep and alcohol. One boozy afternoon, Ben found himself alone with MacKenzie, watching Cecy in the yard. He made MacKenzie a vodka tonic and slumped beside her in her Adirondack chair.
“Have you given up poetry?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, and he thought of his impulse to set down some record of the dying world in lines, knowing how useless it was, how it too would come to ruin, and no one would survive to read it. He admired her body. She wore a bikini, and he could not help imagining the tan lines as Stan stripped it away and carried her off to bed.
“Why bother?” he said. “Who will survive to read it?”
“Perhaps the value of it is in the doing of the thing itself.”
“Is it? Then why did you give up acting?”
“I was never really an actor,” she said. “I’m not delusional.”
She had been the star of a popular sitcom before her single disastrous attempt to break into film, the fading action star, the failed movie.
“I never really made it,” she said. “Or if I did, I never was up to the challenge of real acting. I posed for the camera. The money didn’t matter, not as a measure of artistry anyway. I was a poseur.”
“That’s more than I ever achieved. I was a poseur, too.”
MacKenzie looked at him for the first time, really looked at him, and he saw a bright intelligence in her eyes, a self-knowledge that he had not known
was there. It had been there all along, of course, but he’d been too blind to see it.
“I never read your poetry,” she said.
“Who did?”
They laughed, and he felt that desire for her quicken within him.
Cecy cried out on the lawn. Her ball had plunged over the cliff. Ben retrieved it. When he returned, MacKenzie had moved to a towel. She lay on her stomach. She had undone the back of her bikini top, and he could see the swell of her breast.
“Why do you let Cecy attend the parties?” he said.
“I’m not a bad parent,” she told him. “Her father—he was a bad parent.”
“But you didn’t answer the question.”
She propped herself on her elbows, and he could see her entire breast in profile, the areola of one brown nipple. She looked at him, and he wrenched his gaze away. He met her eyes.
“I will not hide the truth from her.”
“And in ruin is truth?”
“You know there is.”
She lay back down, and he looked out to the sea, and even that was not eternal. “Do you want another drink?” he said.
“I’m positively parched,” she said. So he made them drinks, and they drank until his face grew not unpleasantly numb and they watched Cecilia in the splendor of the grass.
Stan joined them as the shadows grew long and fell across the yard. Then Lois. The four of them drank in companionable silence through the afternoon. MacKenzie said again, “I’m not a bad parent. She has to face it the same as we do.”
Lois nodded. “Perhaps you’re right.”
At the party that night—a sculptor’s—Ben spoke with Veronica Glass.
“Are you ready yet?” she asked.
“I will never be ready.”
“We’ll see,” she said, and drifted off into the crowd. Afterwards he sought out Lois, and they watched together as the sculptor put a sawed-off shotgun in his mouth and blew out the back of his head. A spray of blood and brain and bone adorned the wall behind him; if you stared at it long enough, you could discern a meaning that was not there.
They walked home at dawn.
Stan drifted ahead along the rocky white beach with Lois and Cecilia. Ben and MacKenzie fell back.
“Let’s swim,” she said.
“The water’s icy,” Ben said, but she slipped out of her clothes all the same. With a twinge in his breast, he watched the muscular flex of her ass as she ran into the water. She swam far out to the edge of ruin—he feared for her—before she flipped like a seal and returned. When she emerged from the foaming breakers, crystalline bubbles clung to her pubic hair. Her brown nipples were erect. She leaned into him.
“I’m so cold,” she said. She turned her face to his and they kissed for a long time. He broke away at last and they walked home along the beach. By the time they reached the house and MacKenzie had showered and Cecilia had been seen safely to bed, Stan had laid out lines of cocaine on the kitchen table. The drug blasted out the cobwebs in Ben’s brain. He felt a bright light pervade him, energy and clarity and a sense of absolute invulnerability. Somewhere in the conversation that followed, Stan proposed a change of partners.
“Yes, let’s,” Lois said, and that cool longing for MacKenzie possessed Ben. Then he thought of Veronica Glass, and he said, “I don’t think I can do that, Stan.” They went off to bed soon after. Lois had never seemed so desirable or his stamina so prolonged, and when he made love to her in their bright morning bedroom, he made love to her alone.
One by one, the Christmas lights along the coastline blinked out. The revelers dwindled, the parties became more intimate. Ben spoke with the poet, and they agreed that poetry was a dead art. Yet Ben was flattered when he learned that the younger man had read his work.
“You’re just being kind,” he said.
“No,” the poet—his name was Rosenthal—said, reeling off the titles of Ben’s three books. They had been published by university presses—small university presses, at that—but Rosenthal, who had been published by Little, Brown before Little, Brown decayed into rubble and his editor was ruined, quoted back a line or two of Ben’s. Ben forgave him the National Book Award and his perfect hair, as well. It was all ruined now anyway, meaningless. Maybe it always had been.
That’s what Rosenthal said anyway, and whether he meant it or not, it was true: as meaningless as Stan’s Oscars or the dead novelist’s Pulitzer or any other prize or accolade.
“And do you still write?”
“Every day,” Rosenthal said.
Ben thought of Veronica Glass’s dictum: art for art’s sake. He proposed the tautology, knowing as he did so that even she did not believe it—that her’s was the aesthetic of ruination and destruction and final things.
Rosenthal looked at him askance. “I write the truth as I see and understand it.”
“And will you continue to write?”
“To the very end,” Rosenthal said.
But the end was closer than he perhaps thought: the very next night, he and five others slipped into the black waves and under a full moon swam out to the ruin and ruin took them. As they pulled themselves onto the surface of the dead water, where the moldering fish had blackened into nothing, they became burned effigies of themselves, ashen. Over the next day or so the wind would disintegrate them too into nothing.
That was the night Ben saw Lois slip away into a spare bedroom with the frontman of the slam band, and whether she did it for revenge or out of despair or for some reason beyond his knowing, he could not say—only that he too had had his infidelities, and his was not to judge.
“And what will you do now that she has betrayed you?” Veronica Glass said at his shoulder. “Are you ready?”
“She has not betrayed me,” he said. He said, “I am not ready, nor will I ever be.”
They leaned against the bar, sipping scotch. She slipped him a handful of prime and they smoked a joint together, and the party degenerated into strobic flashes of wanton frenzy: he stumbled into an unlocked bathroom and saw MacKenzie going down on the architect who’d designed the Sony tower in Tokyo, long since ruined. He shot up with Stan in the kitchen. He found himself alone with Veronica on the verandah, looking out at the ruined ocean.
“Did you ever want a family?” he said.
She said, “Hostages to fortune,” and he tried to explain that Bacon had meant something entirely different than what she was trying to say.
“No, that’s what I mean exactly,” she told him, and then he was lying on his back in the grass with Cecy, pointing out the constellations that ruin had not yet devoured. A great wave of grief swept over him, grief for her and grief for all lost things, and as he watched Rosenthal and his companions swim out to meet their ruin, he grieved for them, as well.
Afterwards, Ben threw up on the beach. Someone lay a cool hand upon his neck. He looked up and it was MacKenzie. No, it was Veronica Glass. No, it was Lois. He scraped sand over his vomit, staggered into the icy waves, and fell to his knees, lifting cupped handfuls of water to rinse his mouth until it felt clean and salty. He did not remember coming home, but Lois was in bed beside him when awareness returned. He whispered her awake. They wandered out into the vast glassed-in rooms, in search of drinks and cigarettes.
Stan and MacKenzie still slept.
Ben mixed gimlets and they sat out in the Adirondack chairs, their eyes closed, nursing their hangovers. Their lives had by then become an endless round of revelry and recovery, midnight suicides and daylight drinks on the verandah, grilled steaks, liquor and iced beer in the long afternoons, sex, drugs. Cecilia joined them for a while and then wandered off to the other end of the verandah to play some game of her own invention. She had the virtues and the vices of the only child—she was both intensely independent, playing solo games of her own devising, and profoundly dependent. She had been too early inducted into the mysteries of adult life and she had not yet the emotional maturity to understand them. She was prone to tantrums, and for inexplicable reasons,
Ben alone had the ability to soothe her.
But today she was calm.
Ben turned his face to the sunlight. He held a sip of gimlet in his mouth and wondered when he’d last been completely sober—or when Lois had last been sober, for that matter. She’d gradually slipped into the world he lived in on the road, whether out of despair or some other more complex reasons of her own, he did not know. And regardless of what he’d said to Veronica, he did feel in some degree betrayed. But his feelings were more complicated than that. He felt too a renewed sense of physical desire for her. If she did not possess the beauty of MacKenzie—or Veronica Glass’s aura of sexual intensity—she possessed the virtue of familiarity: he knew how to please her; she knew how to please him. Yes, and love, love most of all.
He reached out for her.
“Did you ever want children?” he asked.
She squeezed his hand. “It’s sweet of you to ask. I used to, but—”
“But I wasn’t the best candidate for fatherhood.”
“No, you weren’t. But you’re a good man, Ben. I always believed that. I knew it, but it’s a little late now, don’t you think?”
“Stan and I were talking about it, that day we walked inland.”
“And what did you see?”
“Ruin,” he said. “Ruin and devastation.”
“Yes. And any child we’d had, she would be ruined by now.” Lois looked the length of the verandah. Cecy pushed along a miniature truck. She sang softly to herself. “That sweet child will be ruined soon enough. And think of the things she has seen.”
“Sometimes— sometimes I think she’s more equipped to see them than we are. It’s part of her reality, that’s all. She barely knows the world before.”
“Do you think we’re the last ones, Ben?”
“Does it matter? Someone somewhere will be. It’s only a matter of time.”
“And nothing will survive.”